27/03/2025—22/11/2025
Artist-Initiated Projects 2024
Pallas Projects/Studios are delighted to announce the participating artists in our Arts Council funded programme of Artist-Initiated Projects 2025. The series of 8 x 3-week exhibitions between March–November 2025 will present exhibitions of new work by:
Cillian Finnerty, Michella Randilu Perera, Niamh Coffey, Reuben Brown, Lucy Andrews, Kathryn Maguire, Gary Farrelly, Caroline Mac Cathmaoil.
Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place between March and November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.
Artist-Initiated Projects aims to act as an incubator for early careers, and support artists' practices at crucial stages, providing a platform for artists to produce and exhibit challenging work across all art forms. The model of short-run exhibitions with a relatively short turnaround time of 3–6 months is an alternative to the normal institutional model, where the process of studio visit to exhibition can take several years. Shorter lead-in times allow the programme to be quick and responsive, reflect what artists are currently making, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.
Programme info:
Exhibitions will run Thursday–Saturday for 3 weeks, with openings taking place on the first Thursday evening. Exhibition dates:
Cillian Finnerty — March 27th – April 12th
Michella Randilu Perera — April 24th – May 10th
Niamh Coffey — May 22nd – June 7th
Reuben Brown — June 19th – 5th July
Lucy Andrews — July 17th – August 2nd
Kathryn Maguire — September 11th – 27th
Gary Farrelly — October 9th – 25th
Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil — 6th - 22nd November
Opening times
Wed 12 - 5
Thur 12 - 6
Fri - Sun 12 - 5
Mon - Tue Closed
Biographies of selected Artists:
Cillian Finnerty is an artist based between London and Co. Mayo, whose work makes significant use of found material to create gamelike forms and diagrammatic assemblages in which meaning is deferred or obscured. Juxtaposed imagery and objects from eclectic provenances are combined to investigate ways in which relations to property and technological production shape our cultural consciousness in ways that are surreal, melancholy, and sometimes humorous.
Cillian is a graduate of the Painting BFA at the National College of Art and Design (2016), MA Publishing at London College of Communications (2022) and School of the Damned, a peer-led alternative art education programme (2022-2024). Recent presentations of work include Remains (Greatorex Street, London), Permanent Mirage with Coilin O'Connell (Radion, Amsterdam), and MUD (St. Anne's House, Bristol). Forthcoming exhibitions include a two-person exhibition with Timothy Furey at the Complex (Dublin, 2025), and an online presentation with Coilin O’Connell for Feature Creep. He received the Agility Award in 2023 and 2024, and the Project Award 2024 from the Arts Council.
@cillianfinnerty / cillian-finnerty.info
Michella Perera is a Sri Lankan-Irish artist who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2017 with an MFA. Her practice incorporates participatory events which function as a research tool, allowing her to explore the impact of cultural practices on communities, and integrate in the shared storytelling of neighbourhoods. Having moved from Sri Lanka, she explores the sensorial story of movement, cultural taboo, and the solidarity/empowerment of women. Her work draws on Ayurvedic practices which use plants, herbs and spices as tools for healing in the Indian subcontinent highlighting indigenous culinary knowledge, medical practices & ethnobotany. Recently she took part in the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India and the TEST Space residency at Limerick City Gallery of Art.
Perera’s acrylic paintings explore the paracosmos of a series of unidentified and highly pigmented women as they actualise a more personal and intimate relationship to cultural material, forgoing traditional practices. Through witchy rituals and unknown superstitions centered around an idiosyncratic understanding of their heritage and indigenous plant lore, the female protagonists reclaim the agency to create and structure their world - a place suggestive of feminocentric ancestral worlds, compiled from nuanced and complex cultural memories.
@michellaperera / michellaperera.com
Niamh Coffey is a visual artist, working through textiles and sculpture. Their work experiments and collages ideas from ecology, queer theory and Irish folklore to create imagined ecological relationships. Their debut solo exhibition will be held in Cultúrlann, Belfast in March 2025. Niamh graduated from NCAD in 2016 with an honours degree in Sculpture and Expanded Practices and a highly commended thesis.
Previous exhibitions in which their work has featured include: Borders at Rua Red; Work/Force/Field/ at A4 Sounds and; Atelier Páipéar at Workhouse Union. In 2023, they took part in peripheriesPOST, an experimental art school and mentorship programme in Gorey School of Art. In 2022, Niamh received an Agility Award from the Arts Council. In 2024, they were awarded Laois County Council's Tyrone Guthrie Centre Residency Bursary. In 2025, they were awarded a place on the RHA’s mentorship course, Critical Correspondence.
Reuben Brown is an emerging visual artist and curator currently based in Belfast, specialising in interactive and experiential installation, research, filmography and 3D-CGI (computer-generated) animation and performance art. His artistic practice is trans-disciplinary, and reflects thematically on the theatrics of rehearsed masculinity and the pageantry of practised maleness, the ephemerality and potential of space and the cultural phenomena of club-culture, club-spaces and club-communities of the past, present and the imagined future.
He is a member and studio-holder at QSS Artist Studios and Gallery in East Belfast, after graduating from Belfast School of Art in Summer 2022. He is also the founder and creative-director of Belfast-based scenography, visual arts and ephemeral-architecture collective “club [construction]” *. He was a recipient of the Agility Award from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council in [2024-25], and as a result his practice is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was also recently awarded the National Lottery Support for Individual Artists Programme (SIAP) - Travel Award [2024-25] from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, who have supported his practice since 2022. He was also the recipient of the INFERNO Residency [2024] in Hackney Wick, London. He has exhibited extensively locally, nationally and internationally; including several notable solo exhibitions and curatorial projects in Belfast, Dublin and London, and international showcase in Berlin; Germany, Brussels; Belgium, New York City; USA & Los Angeles; USA. He has his international solo exhibition debut at the Backshop Culterim Gallery in Berlin; Germany in March 2025.
Lucy Andrews makes sculptures and site-specific installations. She is interested in the meeting of natural and human - made systems, and the places where those categories break down. Her work proposes a dynamic materiality which moves between the organic and inorganic, architectural and geological, grown and made.
Andrews was born in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, and studied at NCAD, Dublin and The Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. She is currently living and working in Ireland and Belgium. She has exhibited at The Complex, IMMA, The RHA, and The Leitrim Sculpture Centre. This year, her work will also be shown as part of the Hear Here festival, by STUK, Leuven.
lucyandrews.net
Kathryn Maguire works in Sligo and holds a Masters in Sculpture from Royal College of Art, a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from CCAD and MA in Art in the Contemporary World from NCAD. They are a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects and environmental awareness projects, creating sculptural installations and interventions, weaving visual arts practice with educational facilitation methods to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. Currently, their work is focused on voices of the forgotten and the dead, the silenced and the non-human, exploring how these voices might have agency in memory and history. Exploring geology, the history of materials, building materials, and the circular economy. Maguire’s practice concentrates on lithics, minerals, mining, and knowing place from the mantle up. They examine rocks, minerals, and fossils from various international locations from a situated land-based practice. Increasingly, their work engages processes of making, informed by earlier training as a jewellery maker and sculptor. They create artworks that convey the experience of the complexities of deep time visible in materials.
Select Residencies & Awards: Leitrim Sculpture Centre Exhibition Residency 2024. CREATE Artists Bursary 2023. Kings Culture Artist in Residence, Kings College & Natural History Museum, London, 2023, Interface Science & Art International Residency; Pasajist, Istanbul & Leitrim Sculpture Centre 2023. GroundWork residency in Norfolk, UK 2022. The London Metallomics Group. The Magnetism Group, Artist in Residence (R&D), CRANN, Trinity College Dublin, 2020. Fish Factory, East Iceland, funded by Arts Council/DLR Council, 2019. Selected Exhibitions: Material Acts, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2025. Soils Turn, ecoartspace, New York, 2025. Depot, Istanbul, Turkey 2025. Hivernal, Roscommon Arts Centre 2024. To the Mountain, Leitrim Sculpture Centre 2024, Whenweceaseto…, Galway Arts Festival 2024. Clifden Arts Festival 2023, Bush House Arcade, Kings College London 2023, Groundwork Gallery, Kings Lynn, Norfolk. 2022. Earthly Bodies, Angel, London 2022.
@kathrynmaguireartist / kathrynmaguire.net
Gary Farrelly is a Brussels-based visual artist and researcher whose work engages with themes of enchantment, red tape, disinformation, epistolary performance, architectural erotics, and peripheral resonance. His performances combine an authoritative tone with manic storytelling, while his inventory-driven material practice incorporates collage, photography, embroidery, and print. Farrelly is the co-founder of the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.), a para-intelligence agency in collaboration with German artist Chris Dreier, investigating self-institution—the creation of fictive or speculative organizational frameworks—as both subject and method for artistic practice.
He is also the co-founder and curator of FLYKTIG/Fugitive, an off-grid performance program in Valdres, Norway. A graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and LUCA School of Arts, he completed post-MA research at a.pass in Brussels. Farrelly is a professor at La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels and a Visiting Researcher at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. His artworks and performances, both personal and collaborative, have been presented in various contexts including Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht), Damien & The Love Guru (Brussels), Kunsthal Ghent, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (London).
@gary_farrelly / garyfarrelly.com
Caroline Mac Cathmhaoil is an Irish artist, writer and filmmaker working between Dublin, London and the less explored regions of cosmic experience. They previously worked under the name Loitering Theatre
Mac Cathmhaoil’s is an esoteric art practice where video, text, artificial intellect, viral interference and future archeologies of time are alchemically melded together - to disrupt the technologies and belief systems of consensus reality.
No job too small. Idiom assured. Call us.
Recent shows include Ticket to Turiya at Orleans House Gallery, London (2024) and This is How I Roll as part of Disrupting the Algorithm at Betafest, Dublin (2024) Recent writing can be found in Winter Papers No.9 They are currently supported on the Project Arts Centre Dublin Research Award Programme and are completing a practice based PhD in Goldsmiths, London
ID: Portraits of the artists selected for the Artist Initiated Projects 2025: Cillian Finnerty, Michella Randilu Perera, Niamh Coffey, Reuben Brown, Lucy Andrews, Kathryn Maguire, Gary Farrelly, Caroline Mac Cathmaoil.